Jon Hartman Photography: small venue, big work

Jon Hartman Photography located at 105 South Division,  looks like a conventional gallery with its clean, whitewashed walls and open style floor-plan. As an artist’s studio, this venue had an easy go of it to create a pleasurable experience, and the artwork housed within its walls was well worth the walk, distanced from central Artprize venues. The ArtPrize venue showcased ten pieces of art that were displayed in the room.   

There are fourteen total entries in the gallery, ranging a wide variety of mediums, themes, genres, and subject matter.  Installations, paintings, sculptures, drawings, all adorned the quaint little studio, including some standout pieces such as Indian Summer, Joanna Tlok, Happy New Year, Paul McClain, and In Her Closet: Clothing as Metaphor, Clare Murray Adams.  

I was prompted to seek-out this quaint little gallery, searching for a series of watercolor paintings by artist Sarah Ross, depicting the seven deadly sins.  Each piece hung side by side, and was easily identifiable; it was generally well-received by other Artprize patrons in the vicinity.  The works were very illustrative and graphic in style, frequenting the use of bold color and strong lines to comprise the interesting compositions.  They feature traditional, contemporary emblems and symbols of the sins, things that would indeed make them easily identifiable, rather than pulling icons from within the deep history of symbolisms that have been associated with the cardinal sins in the past.

  But it was another work One Dream, by artist Jehovany Huerta, that seemed to capture the attention of the viewers, expectedly so, as it is the  largest and most labor-intensive of the pieces featured in this venue.  The large graphite drawing spanned multiple feet, filling an entire wall with the portraits of Michigan residents, all placed on the face of the American dollar bill, replaced with the words “United People of Michigan.”  In front of the extravagant drawing, on the floor, a pile of pencil shavings, a jar of graphite dust, and eraser crumbs, offer proof as to how much time and effort went into the piece.  If this still was not enough, Huerta indicated in the didactics that he spent over 1700 hours, and used 300 pencils.

The Jon Hartman Photography Studio and 87 Orange Photography is located at 105 S. Division Ave.